Search results

Aggression in the workplace has increasingly become a focus of organizational behavior research given its debilitating effects on employees and consistent links to reduced organizational performance. The current literature on workplace aggression presents a bewildering array of definitions with overlapping meanings creating confusion for researchers and academics. In response to this, we consider a range of definitions of workplace aggression and build a taxonomy of workplace aggressive behaviors based on four dimensions: intensity, impact, intentionality, and indirect/direct aggression. This chapter contributes to the field offering a taxonomy of aggressive behaviors at work that can be used in subsequent research.

Purpose – Police violence involving minority citizens is a significant problem in the United States. Efforts to explain the disparate treatment of minorities have often relied on structural-level racial threat hypotheses. However, research framed by this macro-level approach fails to consider meso-level characteristics of spatially specified places within cities. The place hypothesis maintains that police see disadvantaged minority neighborhoods as especially threatening and, therefore, use more violence in them. Reconceptualizing the racial threat model to include meso-level characteristics of place is essential to better explain police violence.

Design/methodology/approach – The argument is investigated using literature drawn from quantitative analyses of structural predictors of police violence and qualitative/quantitative studies of the police subculture and police behavior within disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Findings – Research on the effects of city-level racial segregation on police violence supports the place hypothesis that the incidence of police violence is higher in segregated minority neighborhoods. City-level segregation is, however, only a proxy for the degree of concentrated minority disadvantage existing at the meso-level. Community-level studies suggest that the police do see disadvantaged places as especially threatening and use more violence in them. Plausibly, meso-level neighborhood characteristics of cities may prove to be better predictors of the incidence of police violence than are structural-level characteristics in cross-city comparisons.

Originality/value – This analysis builds on structural-level racial threat theories by demonstrating that meso-level characteristics of cities are central to explaining disparities in the use of police violence. A multilevel approach to studying police violence using this analytic framework is proposed.

The authors examine how different exchange patterns affect structurally disadvantaged actors' interactional justice evaluations and group identification in situations characterized by reciprocal and negotiated exchange.

Laboratory experiment.

Although results replicate prior work finding that disadvantaged individuals view their exchange partners as less fair when exchanging via negotiation rather than reciprocation, they also show the value of considering the pattern of exchange. Indeed, both the form of exchange and the pattern of exchange prompt exchange behaviors that shape how disadvantaged actors view the exchange experience, such that much of the direct effect of the form of exchange is offset by indirect paths, especially when the disadvantaged actor remains committed to their more advantaged partner. These fairness evaluations matter because as the authors show, they affect perceptions of group identification.

Future work should more explicitly consider how emotions as well as different levels of inequality might modify the processes described.

This chapter highlights the need to consider both the form of exchange and the relative stability of exchange when considering the fairness perceptions and group identification of disadvantaged individuals.

The study reported on in this article examines how instructional leadership is exercised by superintendents in effective school districts. We employ concepts drawn from school effectiveness studies and from organizational literature on coordination and control in an attempt to understand how superintendents organize and manage instruction and curriculum in these effective districts. Specific instructional management practices are examined within a framework of six major functions, setting goals and establishing expectations and standards, selecting staff, supervising and evaluating staff, establishing an instructional and curricular focus, ensuring consistency in technical core operations, and monitoring curriculum and instruction. Based on interviews with superintendents from 12 of the most instructionally effective school districts in California and analysis of selected district documents, we present descriptions of district‐level policies and practices that these superintendents use to coordinate and control the instructional management activities of their principals. Similarities and differences in the patterns of control and coordination found in these districts are highlighted. The implications of the findings are then examined in light of recent findings regarding coupling and linkages in schools. The results of this study suggest that superintendents in instructionally effective school districts are more active “instructional managers” than previous descriptions of superintendents would have led us to expect. In particular, coordination and control of the technical core appears more systematic in these districts. The results do not, however, provide a uniform picture of how instruction is coordinated and controlled. A wide range of both culture building activities and bureaucratic policies and practices were emphasized by the superintendents in this study as they exercised their instructional leadership roles.

While many may assume that all students enrolled at historically Black campuses are African American, recent trends suggest these campuses are becoming increasingly diverse. In this chapter, we challenge common perceptions about historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), highlighting both what is known and yet to be known about enrollment trends and the experiences of students from diverse backgrounds at ­historically Black campuses. The chapter presents data from the National Center for Education Statistics, tracking changes in enrollments over time. These data are coupled with a review of research on the experiences of non-Black students at HBCUs, largely focusing on White students, but also integrating the narratives of a growing Latina/o/x student population. HBCUs can also be ethnically diverse, and we examine the heterogeneity within the Black student experience based on ethnic identity and immigrant status. We close with recommendations for research and practice, calling for increased attention to how non-Black populations experience, navigate, and engage HBCU campus communities to promote student outcomes and opportunities for learning across difference.